These are my PERSONAL views and in no way represent the views of The Washington Post Co.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

IAAS: Creating a Private CloudI am seriously considering creating an on-demand private Storage and Compute service as a part of our Shared IT Services. The idea is to wrap a vendor's service raw service in an Extended Management Framework incorporating security, monitoring, governance etc. and offer it to our internal customers. Obviously, I would prefer the vendor to provide the entire Management Framework as well. However, I am not convinced if the service offerings are sufficiently mature and robust.

I am hoping to work on developing an RFI over the summer and early fall. Any inputs on the topic will be appreciated. Please provide it as a comment on this post.

Most IT shops do not have the skillset to create a cloud-like infrastructure. They can adopt SOA and perhaps learn to provide things in an internal SaaS model.

Pushing vendors to go beyond simply exposing services to making their offerings cloud-like is interesting, but I don't understand exactly how that would work. If the goal is to make services much more like Amazon S3 and much less like typical enterprise services, well, OK.

But to me, the cloud is about the simplicity and economics you get from virutalization, open source, clever power management, and many other techniques that drive down costs. If it's the simplicity that you're aiming at (like the S3 example) then I can see where you are coming from.